How to Rank on Bing? – Guide to Bing Search Engine Optimization

July 2, 2015

Would you like to know how to rank on the Bing SERP’s? Then this is your Quick Guide On Bing Search Engine Optimization in 2015.

Most of the search marketing leaders focus on optimizing the website only for Google as “Google is the king of all search engines”. But searches do not end up on Google, other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo also have a good market share, so neglecting these search engines is not a good idea.

Why to Optimize For Bing

You must be thinking that if Google is the king, then why I need to optimize my site for Bing. Don’t forget that Bing is also the second largest search engine in the world. According to the recent comScore search market report Bing received 20% of search market share in March 2015, it means still people are using Bing as their favorite search engine.

Optimizing the site for Bing is also beneficial for Yahoo, the third largest search engine powered by Bing, comprising 13% of market share. If both Bing and Yahoo searches are combined, then the market share reaches to 33%. Thus, targeting only Google means you are almost missing out one third of search traffic.

Keyword optimization: – Including keywords in the blog URL is always good for Bing. For Google, it doesn’t matter whether you have placed keywords in the URL or not, but Bing focuses more on keywords. For example, the below screenshot shows the results for the keyword “web development blog”.

You can see that the top results contain the keyword in the blog URL, that means Bing like these types of URL and give them ranking benefits.

Domain name with keywords: -As the release of Google’s EMD update, the websites that have keyword in the domain name doesn’t rank higher on Google, but in case of Bing, exact match domain has a great impact on rankings.

See the below screenshot of Bing search results for “electricians in Sydney”

You can see that the results appearing at top positions have keywords in their domain names, which means EMD plays an important role for Bing. However, you will never find these results on the first page of Google.

Number of word count in content: – Higher number of word count in the blog post is always rewarded by Bing. It loves the long, unique and engaging content. Bing analyzes the entire content in terms of quality, relevancy, uniqueness and length. Longer content with good quality will always be on top Bing search results.

In Google, the power of brand works even with the lower number of word counts in content, whereas Bing counts the brand factor in a very little extent. Bing gives more importance to word count instead of brand. The blog post having 1000 words will always rank higher on Bing as compared to a blog post with 400 words.

Quality backlinks and social signals: -Google requires the backlinks with quality and quantity both. This is not in case of Bing, it gives less importance to the quantity of backlinks. A dozen of quality backlinks are good enough to rank well on Bing.

It is little bit typical to hit the top Google results with a small number of quality backlinks, but you can easily hit the top Bing search results by building a couple of quality backlinks and can make a good presence of your website.

On the other side, Bing focuses more on social signals as compared to Google. A newly created site with a strong social reputation can easily rank higher in Bing results.

External Links: – External links matters a lot for bing. The few numbers of spammy outbound links are enough to penalize your website on Bing. You must be careful while building outbound link as they must be from high quality websites and must be relevant to your niche.

How To Optimize Your Site For Bing: 5 Easy Techniques

Improve the CTR (Click through rate): – This concept applies for both Google as well as Bing. Bing uses the CTR in its algorithm to provide the most relevant results to its users. There are many ways to increase the CTR of your website. The most effective method to get high CTR is branding. If your brand presence is strong in the market, then definitely you will get high CTR compared to the non-branded results.

Reduce Bounce rate: – It is not enough to increase CTR, Bing also sees how much time the visitor is spending on your website after clicking on it. If the time spent on your website is less than a minute, then your website is in trouble to get down on Bing. The visitor will only visit the entire website if it is good looking and attractive. In order to minimize the bounce rate, you should try to make your website more appealing, eye-catching and engaging.

Produce Rich and engaging content: – Good quality content is the key to become successful in an SEO campaign. Same as Google, Bing also loves high quality, unique and engaging content.

The freshness of the content adds an extra advantage to be a winner in Bing. Try to continuously update your website’s content and blog posts because stale content doesn’t give the long lasting stability on top results.

Build high quality links: -As I have mentioned earlier that quality links highly influence the search results. Similarly “Quality wins over Quantity” at Bing thus you need to focus on quality of links instead of quantity.

Like Google, Bing also provides a lot of options in its webmaster tool to measure the performance and status of your website in search results. Some of the important WMT is listed below.

Sitemap: – In order to make your site visible, it is important that it is crawled by search engine. Submitting the Sitemaps lets the BingBot to easily crawl your website.

Disavow Links: -Disavowing links means to tell the search engines not to take unwanted links into account. But, it should not be your primary solution. If your website has spammy or low quality links, then first try to remove these links. Use the Disavow tool only when you are unable to remove spammy links.

Page Traffic: – It tells the complete detail of which page is performing the highest on Bing including CTR, number of searches etc.

Link Explorer: – With this tool you can check the number of backlinks of a particular page.

SEO analyzer: – It checks the pages against the best practices of SEO. It analyzes the issues in pages and recommends the best solution to fix them.

Keyword research: – It lets you find the keywords that are best suited for your content or website.

To get the complete list of features of Bing webmaster tool, read this guide.

What is Different in Bing SEO: –

Domain name in keywords works to some extent.

Doesn’t require big bunch of quality backlinks like Google

Keyword optimization has a good impacts on ranking

Content with high word count remain in the top Bing results.

Social media is preferred over backlinks

Finally, I hope that this guide on Bing SEO will help you optimize your site for Bing. However, optimization for Google is more important, but you can’t ignore the other search engines. Unfortunately, if your website gets penalized by Google, then still you can be safe on Bing. As I have mentioned in the beginning that Bing also occupies the market share of 20%, so don’t forget Bing.

With that being said, if you would like us to help you rank effectively on the Bing SERP’s do get in touch with us at Online Marketing HQ